Belgium-headquartered Simera Sense has been chosen by LatConnect60 to provide a high-resolution multispectral imager for their upcoming SWIRSAT project.
The SWIRSAT project is receiving funding from the Australian Federal government as part of the Australian Space Agency’s ISI India program. Upon completion, the imager will be delivered to LatConnect60 in Australia for integration and testing with the satellite bus platform.
LatConnect60 is developing solutions to bridge the data-insight gap within the Earth Observation domain. With the SWIRSAT mission, LatConnect60 will focus on collecting information on carbon emissions at a high resolution. For this, they selected Simera Sense’s eight-band MultiScape200 optical payload with 1.5m GSD.
As part of this mission, LatConnect60 aims to lower the cost of data acquisition and insight generation for key indicators like methane and carbon dioxide – supporting the agriculture and resources sectors to achieve emissions reduction and net-zero targets.
“We are proud to have our technology be used for an important mission such as this,” said Simera Sense CEO Johann du Toit. “Climate change is a threat we all face and gathering data on carbon emissions is important to understanding how we can combat it.”
“Integrating the Simera Sense MultiScape200 into this mission will allow us to capture high-resolution imagery basemaps and supporting visual inspection data that is complementary to our objectives of detecting, quantifying and visualising carbon emissions at scale,” said LatConnect60 CEO Venkat Pillay. “SWIRSAT will transform our ability to capture data and generate insights of key climate change indicators that are suitable for both carbon emissions and carbon sequestration monitoring applications.”
Since 2018, Simera Sense is in a rapid growth phase and already has 24 optical payloads in space, more than 40 payloads delivered and ready for launch and approximately 70 payloads to be produced in the next 12 months. With offices in Belgium, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and France, the company is seeing a huge demand for its multispectral and hyperspectral instruments.
